1/22/2009 @ 12:01AM

And On The Seventh Day ...

In 1909, poet Wallace Stevens wrote a letter to his fiancée about what he called the “peculiar life of Sundays,” providing Stephen Miller with the title for his engrossing–and frequently entertaining–new look at the Sabbath in the Christian West, from late antiquity through today.

Stevens, a lapsed Christian, wrote at a time when America’s grim Sabbatarian Sundays were giving way to the Continental model. Prohibitions against shopping, music, museum-going and socializing were falling away.

Today in the U.S. and Britain, Protestantism has all but shed the fourth and arguably least convenient Commandment–to keep holy the Sabbath day. Christians casually go to malls and watch television after (or instead of) church, so it’s hard for them to fathom the Sunday soul-searching that weighed on their forebears.

A preoccupation with the day, inspired by love, loathing or deep conflict, suffused the lives and work of Miller’s subjects. They include Samuel Johnson and James Boswell, Keats, Joshua Reynolds and John Ruskin, Emerson, Thoreau and Edmund Gosse.

The author takes pains to include examples of both “Sunday gladness” and “Sunday gloom” from the works of these and others. In 1942, nostalgic for the sounds of an “English Sunday,” Churchill reinstated the ringing of church bells on the Sabbath. Painter Thomas Gainsborough claimed never to touch work on Sunday.

Samuel Johnson was no Puritan–he edited Shakespeare’s plays and attended dinner parties on Sundays, placing him in opposition to Sabbatarians. But he thought the day should be distinct, and he repeatedly made and broke resolutions to wake up in time for church. According to Boswell, he believed that “people may walk, but not throw stones at birds” on Sunday, and that there “may be relaxation but there should be no levity.”

Miller finds ample evidence of Sunday “mirth,” but the strength of his book is in conveying the downside of the day, the stultifying, often traumatizing effect of severe Sabbatarianism on generations of thinkers.

In 1919, psychiatrist Sándor Ferenczi published “Sunday Neuroses,” arguing that too much free time created depression for some on Sundays. But the strictest Sabbatarians filled the day with church services, self-examination and rigorous Bible study. Edmund Gosse said “the weariness was like physical pain” after the Sabbatarian Sundays of his childhood.

Nineteenth-century art critic John Ruskin recalls his own, in Scotland, the most Sabbatarian country in Europe. “The horror of Sunday,” he said, “used even to cast its prescient gloom as far back in the week as Friday.”

Most Christians make Sunday the day of rest, though the Old Testament calls Saturday the Sabbath. In the year 321, Emperor Constantine declared dies solis (sun day) a public holiday that enabled his Christian subjects to observe their dies Domini, while his pagan ones kept up their sun worship.

Sabbath observance has been debated by clerics and politicians ever since, most often resulting in pragmatic compromises. In 1611, a Virginia law condemned to death repeated Sabbath breakers, yet most Virginians were mainstream Anglicans who disliked Puritanism. One described church as merely “a useful weekly resort to do business.”

That would have shocked Puritan John Northbrooke. Though he admitted “A faithful Christian doe sometimes play and sport himselfe,” on Sunday, his 1577 tract feverishly denounced Sunday dancing, asserting that women “should picke wool or spinne upon the Sabbath day” rather than “daunce impudently and filthily.”

In the early 17th century, England’s King James I issued a proclamation that “no bear-baiting, Bull baiting, Enterludes, Common Plays or other like disorders” be permitted on the Sabbath. But later, perhaps threatened by the Puritans’ growing strength, he issued the Book of Sports, which encouraged dancing, archery, the setting up of Maypoles and other “lawful” post-church behavior.

Miller cites active anti-Sabbatarians Anthony Trollope, Charles Dickens and John Stewart Mill, as well as Keats’ “Written in Disgust of Vulgar Superstition,” which laments “the sermon’s horrid sound.” American literature also provides him with vocal Sunday dissidents. Thoreau wrote that “there are few things more disheartening and disgusting than to hear a preacher shouting like a boatswain in a gale of wind, and thus harshly profaning the quiet atmosphere of the day.” Miller uses his sources to build a vibrant narrative rather than a plodding timeline.

Walt Whitman kept pictures of ancient Gods on his walls, and Ralph Waldo Emerson embraced unstructured spirituality. In 1838, addressing the graduating class at Harvard Divinity School, Emerson dared the students to “love God without mediator or veil,” and, in effect, stop going to church. He wasn’t invited back for 30 years. Edith Wharton praised New Yorkers as poor Sabbatarians, given their “milder manners, a greater love of ease, and a franker interest in money-making and good food” than the children of the Mayflower.

We discover that Boswell attended church happily and was a moderate Sabbatarian who nevertheless wrote and traveled on Sundays. He disapproved of playing cards on the Lord’s day. But in a journal entry from 1762 he wrote, “What a curious, inconsistent thing is the mind of man. In the midst of divine service, I was laying plans for having women.”

The author explains helpfully that “Boswell had three ways of dealing with a gloomy Sunday: going to church, having sex, and drinking heavily.” Like a significant number of Western Christians today, “He often resorted to all three.” Curious and inconsistent indeed, not unlike the Sabbath day itself.

Amy Finnerty, a writer in New York, is a contributor to The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times Book Review.